


Child of the Desert

by tanarill



Series: Gods of Khemet [3]
Category: Ancient Egyptian Religion
Genre: Bandits & Outlaws, Bittersweet, Bloodlust, Cooking, Family, Fear, Female Friendship, Fighting, Flirting, Gen, Jewelry, Leaving Home, Offerings, Prayer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-06-20
Updated: 2007-06-20
Packaged: 2019-07-18 18:29:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16124273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tanarill/pseuds/tanarill
Summary: The part where the heroine gets chosen to do a difficult and dangerous job by an even more difficult and dangerous divinity.She's not unhappy to leave home, but . . .





	Child of the Desert

**Author's Note:**

> And now for someone completely different. This is set in the same universe as [Ellipticals and Straight Lines](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6138870), but the two stories don't really intersect. This was more me getting to know Mayim than backstory, although it is both. I haven't gotten her to show up in any other stories yet, so I don't know why she was so insistent on having this one. Oh well.

“Do you have them?” Mayim asked Ngozi breathlessly.  
  
“Right here,” said Ngozi, patting her pouch. “You’d better be grateful; I had to kiss a soldier for this.”  
  
“Oh, yes,” said Mayim. “How horrible. You _had_ to kiss a soldier from Kharoum.”  
  
Her best friend looked at her with that secretive smile and said nothing. Then again, Ngozi had walked out with six manfriends in as many months, and most of Dejba had bets placed on who she would finally walk in with. Mayim privately thought that it would be Bennu the potter’s son or no one at all.  
  
“Anyway, these will make good offerings at Shrine,” she said.  
  
That did startle Ngozi into speech. “Shrine? _That’s_ why you wanted them?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“But they’re so pretty! Blue beads and even real gold charms! And you’re not even going to _wear_ them?”  
  
Mayim looked at her oddly. “You know I don’t really wear jewelry,” she said. “Even nice bracelets from Kharoum, or wherever these are from originally. But I wanted to give something _nice_ this time. Maybe I’d get an answer . . . ”  
  
Ngozi laughed. “You know that’s never gonna happen, right? I mean, they’re _gods_ , they get the best of the best in Wast. Why should they listen to you?”  
  
“And I suppose you’re going to say that the Baatra aren’t real either?”  
  
Ngozi rolled her eyes. “Well of course _they_ are, but – ”  
  
“They were normal people first. They’re only priests because the gods chose them,” said Mayim firmly.  
  
“Yeah, but just hoping for an answer never did anyone anything.”  
  
“That’s why I offer nice things,” said Mayim, holding up the beads.  
  
***  
  
“Are you done yet?” asked Ngozi.  
  
“Well _now_ I am,” she said. “Seeing as you broke my concentration.”  
  
“You know, the way you go one about concentration and true devotion anyone would think you are a priestess yourself. You ought to join them.”  
  
“You think so?” asked Mayim.  
  
“Why not?” Ngozi shrugged. “You don’t fit in here, that’s for sure.”  
  
She was right. Although the two of them were almost alike physically, with short-cropped hair and dark eyes and skins darker than they’d like from working in their families’ vegetable gardens, they were almost total opposites. Many people in Dejba commented on how unlikely it was that two such opposites could be the best of friends, but they didn’t understand. Mayim didn’t envy Ngozi her free favors and endless admirers, or the way the jingled gently as she walked, the glass beads and simple charms she wore clinking softly against each other. Ngozi didn’t envy her deep thoughts and single-mindedness, the way that she could grind enough grain for a week of bread without noticing because she was thinking.  
  
Everyone in Dejba called her fey, but she wasn’t, not really. She just knew there had to be a better way of making beer, of grinding grain, of tilling fields, if only someone would let her. But she didn’t want to leave Dejba, as most suspected; she was not a peg in a hole too small, but a peg of an entirely different shape forced into the wrong hole altogether. Going to Efi in the south or Kharoum and Wast in the north would not help.  
  
Still. “Maybe not, but I like it here.”  
  
Ngozi snorted. “This little place?”  
  
“It’s home,” said Mayim simply. And, because Ngozi was Ngozi and not her mother or father or half-dozen brothers, not anyone in Dejba but Ngozi, she understood what Mayim wanted.  
  
Mayim didn’t want to run away to Wast. It might be a nice place to visit, but Dejba was home.  
  
***  
  
When she got back, her mother scolded her.  
  
“Where have you _been_? It’s near sunset already, and I heard a rumor that there’s bandits around! You shouldn’t be wandering around like that!”  
  
Mayim ignored it, like she always did, and put away the grain she’d bought in the big bin. Then she took out the family’s copper knife, tested how sharp it was against here thumb, and began to chop the vegetables. Her mother continued to rant for a while, while she did the things necessary to make sure that there would be food on the table when Aba arrived. Eventually, her mother stopped talking, and then asked, “Have you been listening, Mayim?”  
  
“No,” replied Mayim. “I’m busy with dinner.”  
  
Her mother flushed. Dinner was _her_ job, but these days Mayim was doing it more and more. And it wasn’t that she wasn’t a dutiful daughter; all her chores got done, and done well, with commendable promptness. It was just that as soon as chores were finished, which generally happened earlier rather than later, she always went to Shrine . . . and her mother didn’t think it healthy for a young woman like her to always be praying. To her credit, she was probably right. Ngozi noticed the boys, had been noticing them for years. But she didn’t find any particular attraction, although they were nice enough.  
  
“What about the bandits?” asked her mother, eventually.  
  
“What about them?” she replied.  
  
“If you got caught and taken. What would we do?”  
  
“Survive,” said Mayim. “Get on with your lives. Wait for me to come back. I always will, one way or another.”  
  
“ . . . yes, I know you would. But Mayim, we love you. It would hurt to be without you.”  
  
Mayim’s lips quirked into a smile. “I know.”  
  
***  
  
After dinner, she cleaned up the few remaining scraps and pulled her younger brother Yzne to bed. He was asleep very soon, but he was six. Then she thought about her life, and the conversation she’d had with Ngozi earlier.  
  
_“And I suppose you’re going to say that the Baatra aren’t real either?”_  
  
Ngozi rolled her eyes. “Well of course they _are, but – ”_  
  
“They were normal people first. They’re only priests because the gods chose them.”  
  
She didn’t really want to be a Baatra either. Baatra, by all accounts, paid and paid dearly for the divine power they had. Not just their half-animal forms, which went from Hathor’s ungainly cow form to Horus’ breathtaking eagle form and Anubis’ frightening jackal form. They had to follow the wills of their gods wherever they led, to the boundaries of Khemet and beyond. Beyond the end of the world, some said.  
  
But if being a Baatra was the price she had to pay to find a place where she fit, then so be it.  
  
_“You don’t fit in here, that’s for sure.”_  
  
Mayim sighed and turned over, cradling her younger brother to her chest. The words were true, but they hurt.  
  
_Please_ she asked in her head. _Even if I am just a stray girl from a tiny village just a week north of the border, I want to be make a difference. Let me make a difference._  
  
She did not cry.  
  
***  
  
When she woke up the next morning, Mayim _knew_ something was wrong.  
  
This was partially because of the way that Yzne was screaming his head off but mostly because of the way the world smelled. Yzne smelled like himself only more so, their little mat like a mix of him and her and the other two brothers who slept in the room and were always climbing over her. The world looked funny too, but that didn’t mater very much, because something, and she suspected it was herself, has scared her brother.  
  
“Quiet,” she growled, and was only a little surprised to find that it was hard to talk because her mouth wasn’t really made for human speech.  
  
Yzne stopped crying, if only out of sheer terror. She could hear her other brothers awake and trying not to show it.  
  
_You wanted to make a difference. There are sacrifices._  
  
Mayim could also feel the way that her breast band had burst, which was not a problem because she was rapidly becoming aware that she wasn’t quite human.  
  
And something was _wrong_. She could smell smoke.  
  
She left the small, dark room and bolted through the house until she reached the street. It was wider, just a bit, wide enough that she could lean forward and trust her tail to counterbalance her.  
  
There were shades and colors of gray that hadn’t existed before.  
  
_Are you willing to accept the power?_  
  
There were men in the town market. In a small village of mud-brick houses there wasn’t much that could burn, but what could burn was. A team of them was fighting off the village men, her Aba among them. A second was emptying the grain stores.  
  
They would starve without those stores.  
  
With a roar, Mayim threw herself into the fight.  
  
It didn’t last long. She had claws, and teeth, and whatever she looked like now it was plainly terrifying. A few of them had the presence of mind to fight her, but another thing she had on them was speed and balance. She could hear them trying to be quiet, felt the tiniest air currents, dodged all but the most difficult of strikes, and always they bled. It smelled like food.  
  
_Are you willing to pay the price?_  
  
There was a moment off strangeness when she turned to face the next one, and there wasn’t a next one, just people she’d known her entire life unsure of who or what she was, of if she was even on their side. It was a moment when everything she wasn’t wanted her to kill because she could hear the blood pulsing through their veins, and she had to fight back with everything she was to keep from attacking.  
  
Then the moment ended, and she felt herself drain into herself, and most of the colors and the scents and the sounds went away, and she was just herself, naked and looking at her father looking incredulously at her.  
  
“Mayim?”  
  
***  
  
Mayim tugged absentmindedly at the beads in her wig, careful not to dishevel it or touch her face. Seka and Zahur would skin her alive if she undid all of their work so quickly. The boat moved quickly along the River, she thought, like life.  
  
So much could change in a single night. She was still Mayim, but she was also a Baatra of Sekhmet. All the men in Dejba would, and six had, sworn it up and down to the Magister of Efi, while he looked on unconvinced until something inside her had snapped and she felt herself change, almost distantly, while the little mouse of a man squeaked and tried to hide. He’d believed her, then.  
  
She had plenty of fine things to offer the gods now. Baatra were given anything they asked for and more besides, in hopes of currying favor with their gods. She had the power of life over Seka and Zahur, her anything-but-meek body-slaves. She had a fine wig and as many bracelets, not just of glass but of real lapis lazuli and carnelian and gold, as she could wear. This entire boat theoretically belonged to her, or at least the Goddess Sekhmet, and since she was very nearly the goddess now, that meant her.  
  
They were sending her to Wast and the Karnak Temples to learn to control this power, among the priests there. There would be other Baatra, and even (or so she’d been told) two other Baatra of Sekhmet, even if they were old enough to be her mother. She sighed. Wast would undoubtedly be big and grand, full of everything that the Two Lands and beyond could make, buy, or sell. There might be people there like her, if the way Baatra were chosen was right – “It’s the _personality_ the god or goddess looks for, not the person” – but it wouldn’t be Dejba.  
  
Dejba wouldn’t be Dejba either, not if even Ngozi looked at her with shocky-wide eyes when she found herself annoyed at the villagers who didn’t believe that she had found, _and defeated_ the thieves. There had been nothing to attack, so her second transformation hadn’t lasted as her first, but she’d had to rein it in every bit as fiercely and the power was all still there, pulsing gently beneath her skin.  
  
It was, indeed, a heavy price to pay.

**Author's Note:**

> This week I learned a lot of elementary kinetics. It turns out that many kinetic experiments done in the past used clever tricks and some not-always-great assumptions because human brains are _future probability machines_ , not _rigorous mathematical calculators_. The weird thing is where a lot of those tricks and assumptions are still in use, despite computers being a thing now. We can do the actual calculations now, or at least tell Mathematica to do them. Not unrelated, I have learned that calculus is literally only useful for AP Calc/College. When you get to the real world, there are programs to do that for you. No one does it by hand, because the computers are too stupid to make mistakes.
> 
> Also a lot of running around trying to get health insurance, which I need, because my immune system is Very Confused and thinks that my intestines are pathogen invaders. If I don't have my Very Expensive Medication, I will very shortly not have intestines. It's a problem.
> 
> As always, post if you notice spelling/grammar issues.
> 
> On an unrelated note, do those of you who are following me get notifications when I post things even when they are backdated like this? Curious minds want to know.


End file.
